Artist transforms everyday urban landscapes into surreal photos

This article was taken from the March 2012 issue of Wired
magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before
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Victor Enrich finds most
architecture pretty mundane --
so he decided to turn existing buildings into photorealistic
fantasies. The 33-year-old starts by taking a photo of a real-world
structure. He then turns that two-dimensional image into a 3D model
of the building with Autodesk's 3ds Max Design
software, using information culled from satellite photos, building
plans and emporis.com,
which collates data on building projects worldwide. Next he
recreates the textures of the building and the environmental
lighting.

"Once I've got the building in my hands, I can start playing
with it," he says. "Every building in the end has simple
transformations: bending or twisting elements." It takes Enrich a
month to create one of his surreal reimaginings. "I have a big
inner world," he says. "And I'm sharing it with the outer
world."